Allowing no spare moment for the reader to acclimate themselves, the taut, confident opening chapter of With Teeth immediately establishes the punctuated tension and merciless urgency that the earlier effort sometimes lacked. Arnett signals her writerly evolution from the first lines of this new work. Her third book and second novel, With Teeth follows Arnett’s collection of stories about familial dramas and personal conflicts, Felt In The Jaw, and her successful debut novel, Mostly Dead Things. In this light, Kristen Arnett’s With Teeth is among the more satisfying and accomplished books of the past year. Perhaps the hardest thing for an author to manage is evolving book-to-book, pushing themselves to move in fresh directions, be it via form, content, or style, to jolt free of whatever comfortable avenue with which they’d begun.

While this is understandable given the enormous challenge that writing and publishing just one book presents to the writer (not to mention every reader’s endlessly distended To Be Read pile preventing a great number of oeuvres from being consumed entirely), there are illuminating angles that can be seen with a broader lens.

For all the ink shed-in reviews, interviews, and criticism-about the trials and tribulations of navigating the literary world on the level of the individual novel, comparatively little space is provided to career-wide discussions.

Kristen arnett with teeth